Sex and the Ordinary Cuban: Cuban Physicians, Eugenics, and Marital Sexuality, 1933–1958

[Frigid] women don’t understand the importance of the sex act because they are incapable of enjoying it in the least bit. These are the women who refer to their spouse as “the father of my children” instead of “my husband.”

—Rafael Nodarse González, medical student at the University of Havana, 1952

The obligations imposed by law and religion in order to achieve marital stability are for the most part insufficient when there is no rapport nor necessary affinity between the man and woman.

—José Chelala Aguilera, Cuban eugenicist and physician, 1948

In a 1940 speech to fellow Cuban physicians, obstetrician and gynecologist José Chelala Aguilera contended that an Argentine politician who had famously claimed that “to govern is to populate” had gotten it all wrong.¹ Instead, Dr. Chelala insisted, the statesman should have declared: “To govern is to populate well.”² By asserting that such a thing was possible, that a state could indeed “populate well,” Chelala was alluding to the eugenic concept that, with careful planning and policy making, nation-states could do much to improve the quality and “fitness” of their citizenry.

Simply put, eugenics is the science of improving human breeding based upon theories of heredity. It was a novel way of applying science to the regulation of sexual reproduction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Eugenicists proposed that this new science, based on Lamarckian or Mendelian theories of heredity, could be used to improve the quality of humans. Scholars have claimed that the eugenics movement ended in the 1930s and 1940s once the general public became aware of Nazi abuses and as advances in genetic science debunked its findings.³ Scholars have also highlighted the racist ideologies pervasive in many eugenicists’ endeavors and emphasized the role of the state in enacting regulatory measures influenced by eugenics.⁴ More recently, historians have broadened the scope of what we can label eugenic endeavors, demonstrating that eugenic ideas and language were shared by a wide variety of social groups and were put into practice in a variety of ways well into the 1960s and 1970s.⁵ Indeed, most scholars would agree with Frank Dikotter that “eugenics was not so much a clear set of scientific principles as a ‘modern’ way of talking about social problems in biological terms.”⁶ Recent scholarship that focuses on gender, sexuality, and US eugenics after World War II illustrates that, instead of advocating for political or institutional measures to facilitate eugenic improvements, postwar era eugenicists targeted laypersons and promoted normative and unequal gender roles within marriage as a means to maintain stable, reproductive family relations.⁷

A similar shift toward encouraging people to create and maintain stable families occurred among Cuban eugenicists in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. A close assessment of the words and actions of eugenicist José Chelala and other like-minded Cuban physicians active during this period reveals that they too became preoccupied with familial and marital stability as a means to facilitate the eugenic improvement of the population.⁸ Cuban eugenicists fostered direct relationships with ordinary citizens in the hope that teaching married couples how to have better sexual relationships would, in turn, stem the national divorce rate. They believed that children raised in stable, two-parent homes were less likely to become juvenile delinquents and adult criminals and that monogamy and matrimony were indicative of moral advancement in a democratic nation. For these physicians, the “problem” of divorce and the breakup of the “traditional” family in Cuba were indicative of larger national problems that swelled as Cubans set about creating a new and democratic Cuban Republic.

In this article I describe the words and actions of a specific group of Cuban physicians as they bid for a public role in the making of a new Cuba. I explore these physicians’ efforts to take up the slack of what they perceived to be a government ill equipped and unmotivated to address efficiently what was widely touted to be Cuba’s divorce problem. These medical professionals focused on divorce, connecting it...